Dr. Drew Wilfahrt joined the Delgoffe Lab as a Postdoctoral Associate in February 2022. Drew was born and raised in Watertown, South Dakota. During his time as an undergraduate at Saint John’s University, Drew was exposed to the exciting world of Immunology and has never since looked back. He received his PhD in Immunology from Mayo Clinic Graduate School in 2021, where he studied the regulation of cholesterol metabolism in T cells during activation.
Drew joined the Delgoffe lab to continue to learn about immunometabolism in the context of tumor immunology. Drew is fascinated by the simple idea that epigenetic marks are just metabolites hooked to histones. In line with this idea, his work in the Delgoffe lab examines the relationship between changes in environmental metabolites and changes in T cell epigenetics. Given that T cells perform their functions in many different tissue microenvironments, understanding how T cells respond to acute metabolic stress is critical to understanding how T cells do their jobs.
Drew's ResearchGate Profile
wilfahrt@pitt.edu
Favorite piece of lab equipment? Flow cytometer
What immune cell are you? Dendritic Cell – I’m at my best when I digest information (antigens) and can break it down into something simple (peptides) and present it to others (T cells).
Favorite Candy? Toblerone, but by the time you’re reading this it’s probably something else.
What superpower do you wish you had? Teleportation. I don’t like commuting.